The Document Detective

Georgia State historian Nick Wilding lives a double life. On the one hand, he’s a Renaissance scholar specializing in Galileo, one of the great scientific minds of all time. But in a second life, he’s a literary detective sleuthing out forgeries of prized manuscripts and rare books worth millions of dollars. Wilding is so good at this he has been invited to speak to packed audiences at the Library of Congress and auction houses, and been involved in criminal investigations in several countries. The professor and associate chair of history at Georgia State teaches a course on forgery at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia each summer. And though his most famous finds are of forgeries of Galileo’s works, he is often called in to verify the authenticity of other rare manuscripts.

“I had a sinking feeling when I saw Nick Wilding’s name on an email last May,” admits Pablo Alvarez, curator at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan Library.

One of the library’s great treasures is Galileo’s presumed draft of a letter, along with sketches of the moons of Jupiter, that are linked to his historic epiphany — that the planets of our solar system orbit the Sun. The library acquired the document in 1938.

Wilding had suspicions that the document — which had already been authenticated by several Galileo scholars — was actually a sophisticated fake.

“The document was supposed to be a draft,” Wilding says, “but in this draft, Galileo had on his Sunday best — a formal hand. At that time in Europe, most people had different styles of handwriting to suit different purposes.”

There were other anomalies that only an ardent scholar of the astronomer, already intimate with every quirk of his writing styles, would see. That includes Galileo’s habit of letting the crossbow of a “t” dip into the letter “e” if it followed (absent in the library document), or the fact that one batch of ink had been used for observations that were nearly six months apart. Even the quill, to Wilding’s eye, seemed wrong—“broad and cut to a chisel tip, a quill that Galileo never used,” he explains. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have been more discerning.

For scholars and curators, original documents are treasured objects that are like living time capsules.

“For 12 years, I have lived with this manuscript as if I too were in the 17^th century,” Alvarez says.

He often showed it to students, faculty and donors, and used it to help explain modern astronomy. But when he got the fateful email, he immediately went to take photos of the manuscript’s watermark as Wilding had requested. Paper was once made by hand, and watermarks identify the place of origin, and often the manufacturer. The watermark in this case was a circle with a three-leaf clover and the monogram, “AS/BMO.” Within a month, with the help of colleagues, Wilding and Alvarez knew it was indeed a fake. “BMO” is an abbreviation for the Italian city of Bergamo, and matches the watermark in documents dated to 1790 in a reference book about ancient papermills. That paper and watermark did not exist nearly two centuries earlier in 1610 when Galileo would have penned his draft and drawings. By June 10, the evidence was overwhelming. The document had likely been forged by a notorious counterfeiter, Tobias Nicotra. In fact, while researching the Michigan document, Wilding discovered another Nicotra Galileo forgery held by the Morgan Library in New York City.